What Your Blended ADR Isn’t Telling You

Here’s a thing that happens to owners and it makes them do the wrong thing.

The annual report comes in. Occupancy is up. Revenue is up. And ADR is down. The instinct is immediate: we’re discounting, someone is giving away rate, tighten pricing.

Sometimes that’s right. Frequently it’s the opposite of right, and acting on it costs real money.

Blended ADR is a mix statistic wearing a rate costume

A campground doesn’t sell one product. It sells at least three, and they price very differently:

• Transient — nightly, weekend, peak season. The highest daily rate you’ll ever capture.
• Extended stay and long-term — monthly, workforce, snowbird. A fraction of the transient rate, by design.
• Seasonal — the whole season up front, lowest daily rate, highest certainty.

Blended ADR is the average across all three, weighted by how many nights each one sold. Which means the mix can move the number without a single rate changing.

Sell more long-term nights this year than last, and your blended ADR falls even if you raised every rate at the property. The number went down. Your pricing went up. Both are true simultaneously, and the blended figure cannot distinguish them.

Why this is happening to everyone right now

The extended-stay share of this industry is growing, and it’s growing for structural reasons rather than seasonal ones. Demand for outdoor hospitality is being driven by durable structural tailwinds: the remote-work migration, the growth of full-time RV living, and an affordability squeeze — inflation, rising housing costs, and fuel prices — that is pushing Americans toward lower-cost, longer-stay living. Layered on top is surging workforce housing demand near industrial and construction projects, converting what was once transient traffic into stable, recurring revenue. A guest base that has shifted from vacationers to long-stay residents.

That shift is generally good business — long-stay occupancy is more predictable, carries lower acquisition cost per night, and puts a floor under the shoulder and off seasons where a transient-only property faces a cliff after Labor Day.

But it will make your blended ADR look soft while it’s happening. If the only rate number you look at is the blended one, a successful mix shift reads exactly like a pricing failure.

What to measure instead

Stop looking at one number. Look at four:

1. ADR by stay type. Transient, long-term, and seasonal, each on its own line. This is where you find out whether your rates actually moved.
2. Night share by stay type. What percentage of your occupied nights came from each. Compare to last year. This is your mix.
3. RevPAR. Rate and occupancy together. A property trading rate for occupancy on purpose should show it here.
4. Revenue per occupied night by segment, including ancillary. A long-term guest at a lower nightly rate who buys propane every week may out-earn a transient guest at three times the rate.

Run those and the story resolves in about ten minutes. Either your rates fell — a real problem with a clear fix — or your mix moved, which is a business decision you should be making deliberately rather than discovering at year end.

The decision it unlocks

Once you can see mix separately from rate, the actual strategic question comes into focus: how much of your inventory do you want carrying a floor, and how much do you want exposed to peak?

There is no universally correct answer. A property near a large industrial project should probably lean into workforce extended stay. A destination property with three strong months should probably protect transient inventory aggressively and price it accordingly. Most parks have never made the choice at all — they’ve simply accepted whatever mix arrived.

That’s the difference between revenue management and rate setting. Rate setting picks a number. Revenue management decides what you’re selling, to whom, and for how long — and then prices each of those deliberately.

You cannot manage a number you’ve only ever seen blended.